ON THE BORDER / For the Tohono O'odham, the U.S.-Mexican border is a recent and difficult development. In this part of an occasional series, The Chronicle examines the unique life of this tribe.

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PST, Saturday, December 3, 2005

Harry Noriega of the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation, lives in Mexico, where he pauses for a moment in a small chapel, but regularly crosses the border onto the reservation. The Tohono O'odham, whose reservation straddles the border and struggles with migrant-related crime, trash and medical emergencies. We travel to the Arizona/Mexico border June 20-24 for a series of stories about what the border looks and feels like, how it affects the people and cultures nearby, and how it works from day to day.
Chris Stewart / The Chronicle less

Harry Noriega of the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation, lives in Mexico, where he pauses for a moment in a small chapel, but regularly crosses the border onto the reservation. The Tohono O'odham, whose reservation ... more

Photo: Chris Stewart

Photo: Chris Stewart

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Harry Noriega of the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation, lives in Mexico, where he pauses for a moment in a small chapel, but regularly crosses the border onto the reservation. The Tohono O'odham, whose reservation straddles the border and struggles with migrant-related crime, trash and medical emergencies. We travel to the Arizona/Mexico border June 20-24 for a series of stories about what the border looks and feels like, how it affects the people and cultures nearby, and how it works from day to day.
Chris Stewart / The Chronicle less

Harry Noriega of the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation, lives in Mexico, where he pauses for a moment in a small chapel, but regularly crosses the border onto the reservation. The Tohono O'odham, whose reservation ... more

Photo: Chris Stewart

ON THE BORDER / For the Tohono O'odham, the U.S.-Mexican border is a recent and difficult development. In this part of an occasional series, The Chronicle examines the unique life of this tribe.

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2005-12-03 04:00:00 PDT San Miguel, Ariz. -- Driving the red clay roads of the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, Harriet Toro passed an adobe house with a fence of dried ocotillo and jounced over a cattle guard that marks the border with Mexico.

When it reaches the reservation, the Mexico-U.S. border fades to a few strands of barbed wire.

But here the border is even more than an international dividing line. It divides a people.

The Tohono O'odham, or Desert People, hunted deer and harvested acorns, wild spinach and prickly pear for 6,000 years on this unforgiving high desert before the border was scrawled across it in 1853.

Now, the Tohono O'odham reservation is on the front line of the battle over drug and immigrant smuggling, and that is costing the tribe scarce resources and impeding its ability to move freely back and forth.

Many Indians cross the border regularly. Residents of the Mexican state of Sonora visit their doctors at the tribal health center in Sells, Ariz. Indians on the American side trek, as their ancestors did, to summer camps in Sonora. A few children wait each morning at the cattle guard, known as the San Miguel Gate, for the O'odham school bus to take them 25 miles north to school in Sells.

From Page A1 | Minutes after crossing into Mexico, Toro pulled up at three small houses surrounding an outdoor kitchen -- Harry Noriega's place -- just as Noriega, 69, had climbed into his pickup to fetch some ice from the nearest settlement, six miles across the border in Arizona.

Noriega stepped back down, and the two chatted softly in a mixture of English and the lilting, sibilant speech of their native language, O'odham, punctuated by "K" and "T" sounds. Around them, cicadas chirred in the mesquite trees, and the heat climbed this summer day.

A life on both sides

"I've spent half of my time on this side and half on the other side," Noriega said, a quick smile lighting his leathery face. "I was born right where the road crosses over the border. All that's there now is a hump of dirt."

With his tribal identity card, Noriega is entitled to cross at the San Miguel Gate, which is not a formal port of entry into the United States.

But it's not straightforward anymore. As border controls toughened in urban areas beginning in 1994, illegal immigration and drug smuggling shifted to this remote land, forcing U.S. Border Patrol agents here to try to stem the flow of marijuana and human beings. Some locals say the agents have harassed them in recent years.

"One day a policeman stopped us and told us, 'Next time, go through Sasabe,' " Noriega recalled.

That's a 140-mile journey, most of it over rough dirt roads -- a long way for a bag of ice.

Tribal police Sgt. Vincent Garcia accepts the presence of the Border Patrol. Veteran agents get familiar with Indians' vehicles and wave them through the gap in the barbed-wire fence and down the hard clay road. But many O'odham people dislike the Border Patrol, Garcia said, because newly arrived agents often stop them and ask for their papers.

"Citizens get upset. They feel they're being harassed by the agents," said Garcia. "They see themselves as O'odham first and American or Mexican second."

Funds stretched

The tribe has augmented its modest revenue with proceeds from three casinos it began operating in the 1990s, but it still struggles.

"That's money that should be spent on health, education and development for our people," said Vivian Juan-Saunders, Toro's boss and chairwoman of the 28,000-member tribe.

Per capita income on the reservation was just over $8,000 in 2000, a fraction of the national figure of $22,000 and also well below the average for all Indian tribes, $13,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Fewer than half of O'odham adults have completed high school, the lowest rate for all U.S. Indian tribes.

Toro, a 58-year-old mother of six with straight salt-and-pepper hair falling to her waist, visits the border often in her work for the tribal government. With Mexican-born grandparents, she feels a strong affinity with those like Noriega whose lives straddle the line.

"The places where we would traditionally pick our saguaro fruit are right around here," Toro said, pointing toward the horizon. "My family would go to the other side of that mountain there."

The tribe's terrain once stretched from Hermosillo, 175 miles south of where the border is now, all the way north to the Gila River in Arizona and from Tucson west to the Colorado River. Today's reservation encompasses a much smaller area, a 2.8 million-acre chunk of Arizona the size of Connecticut. But people who identify as tribal members still live as far as 90 miles south in Mexico.

Toro asked Noriega to guide her to a chapel about a mile away. A cloud of dust rose behind his truck as he left and drove north for the ice.

A deepening impact

The little church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, tucked among the creosote bushes, is seldom used because permanent residents are scarce in the hot, dry plain between the Mexican towns of Sasabe and Sonoyta, and they're getting scarcer.

But the church door is always unlocked, and locals keep the white stucco sanctuary clean with a corn-straw broom they prop in the corner. The door opens to the east, in the tradition of Sonoran Catholicism, a blend of O'odham religion and the Catholicism brought to the region by missionaries in the 17th century. The altar is decorated with tissue paper flowers, magenta streamers and an arc of plastic roses over a statue of the Virgin.

"The last time we came here, you could tell a lot of I.A.s had been here, from the little things they left on the altar," Toro said, using the tribe's shorthand term for illegal aliens. She said many stop to pray before starting the perilous hike into the United States.

The deepening impact of immigrants is clear everywhere on the reservation, including Toro's home, where a group recently stopped by.

"They wanted food and we were eating so we gave them a couple of plates," she said. "We thought they'd be on their way, but they grabbed a bag of clothes on the way out. They want to dress like Americans to blend in, so they stole my grandson's clothes right under our noses."

Before visiting Noriega, Toro had led Garcia into the mesquite scrub to show him a pair of immigrant encampments she had recently discovered near her house. First they saw trash: empty tuna cans and Gatorade bottles, discarded toothbrushes and deodorant, abandoned blue jeans, brassieres and backpacks. The immigrants had collected some of the debris into black plastic trash bags, but more was scattered across the ground.

Then Toro pointed out a pair of low shelters built of branches, just big enough for a clutch of immigrants to hide from Border Patrol helicopters.

Garcia, a burly 42-year-old in his 17th year on the force, said it was about two years ago that he began spending more time coping with illegal immigration.

"Sometimes I'll stop a group of illegals, and I'll call the Border Patrol, but they'll say they won't have anyone available until the next shift in six hours," he said. "So I'll let the people go and tell them which way to Phoenix. I try to estimate the kilometers for them."

Dead and dying immigrants have become a common sight, especially during the brutally hot summer months, when desert temperatures routinely surpass 110 degrees. In fiscal year 2005, a record 473 people died crossing the border from Mexico, 144 of them in the stretch of Arizona that includes the reservation.

"Yesterday we picked up a dead illegal alien," said Garcia, shaking his head. "He was probably 75 yards from a residence."

Drug traffic

The Border Patrol seized more than 130,000 pounds of marijuana on the reservation last year, according to Border Patrol spokesman Sean King.

Traffickers recruit unemployed Indians on the American side to run carloads of dope to Tucson, luring them with the promise of big money, Garcia said.

"These are kids who've never had more than a couple hundred dollars, so when they get $3,000, they'll do it again," he said. "They get hooked. You see a house that's poor, and it has a new car in the driveway, a big-screen TV. ... They know you know. But things get so bad out here."

Garcia's own brother was arrested trying to run a load of marijuana across the reservation with his wife and kids in the car. He spent a year in federal prison and is serving five years on probation.

"He wanted the easy money," Garcia said.

A fence, like the 15-foot-high steel walls the federal government has erected in Douglas and Nogales and Tijuana, would make Garcia's job easier. But he's not in favor of dividing the land that way.

"I wouldn't like to keep the wildlife from doing what they do naturally," said Garcia, an avid hunter.

Toro recalls stories her mother and aunt would tell about the family's winter camp near Baboquivari Peak, the sacred mountain that is the mythical home of I'itoi, or elder brother, who made the O'odham people out of clay and gave them the gift of the crimson sunset.

In the dwindling light, she crossed back into the United States. Nighthawks swooped past, chasing insects, and a roadrunner scurried in front of the car -- a sign, the O'odham say, that you have forgotten something.

Toro had a meeting with the chairwoman back in Sells but made a detour to the home of 90-year-old Jesús Antonio López and his daughter Mariana, whose flour tortillas are known as the best on the reservation. The day's tortillas had been sold, so Toro accepted a cold grape soda and a seat in the kitchen. Before long, Mariana López was serving a meal of refried beans, Mexican cheese and her family's portion of tortillas.

On the drive back to Sells, storm clouds began spitting rain on the dry land.

Dusty and tired from a day on the road, Toro entered Juan-Saunders's office, where baskets woven from strands of yucca and devil's claw depict I'itoi walking through the maze of life.

Toro sat down heavily. The chairwoman, too, looked weary.

The tribe has approved the installation of vehicle barriers along the border on the western part of the reservation, she said, because that's where drug runners and cattle rustlers from Mexico cross most often. But she doesn't want to wall off the reservation.

"We have concerns about the needs of tribal members to go across," she said. "There are sacred sites and cemeteries that people need to have access to."

Lightning flared across the desert outside.

"The border issue is not going to go away. We didn't ask them to place it here, and we were not consulted," says Juan-Saunders. "All we ask for is a seat at the table on policies that affect the border."

Tohono Oodham Nation

The tribe has 28,000 enrolled members, of whom 1,400 live in Mexico. In addition, 3,000 Mexican citizens have applied to be recognized as tribal members. The reservation is 2.8 million acres, the size of the state of Connecticut.

Length of the border:

Tohono Oodham reservation: 75 miles

U.S.-Mexico: 1,952 miles

Deaths of illegal immigrants*:

West Desert corridor, which includes the reservation: 144

U.S.-Mexico border: 473

Arrests of illegal immigrants*:

West Desert corridor, which includes the reservation: 191,515

U.S.-Mexico border: 1,171,305

Part 1 / Nov.27

Mission, Texas: Factories on the Mexican side of the border draw people from both Mexico and the United States toward new jobs.

Part 2 / Nov. 28

Elsa, Texas: Young people balance American individualism with Mexican American family traditions.

Part 3 / Dec. 1

Nogales, Sonora: Hospitals in southern Arizona hope to reduce their cost of caring for uninsured immigrants by improving hospitals across the border.

Part 4

Sells, Ariz.: An Indian tribe's ancestral lands are bisected by the border and affected by its problems.

Part 5

Jacumba, Calif.: A night with Minutemen patrolling for illegal immigrants.